Decision Central but Not a Train in Sight (About depression)

Indecision being indecisive, tunnel vision would be nicer. Plotting the pros and cons out on paper is one way to get through this mental blockage when depression strikes. Yeah are you feeling it now just a little? When the simple everyday decisions, even down to deciding if there is enough milk left in the fridge to get through breakfast is a decision that can bring anxiety. It is part of the loss of productivity that goes with depression. We aren’t a fully functioning human-being at all.

We go about depression strewn lives in a bubble of discontent, and a bubble where we make no decisions of any value at all, let alone easily made decisions. It is as though we aren’t the same person, and our minds are covered in ivy that stops it doing the things which it once did well, trials it carried out in the past without trial.

Thinking about depression and what it does to us here, maybe it is for the best that we aren’t able to make any big decisions. Looking at depression should be done with rose tinted glasses that say ‘let us take the view that depression is only a temporary problem,’ a view that, ‘we will come through it.’

What would be the point of making big decisions when the mind is not in a good place? Wouldn’t all of those decisions be tainted with the badness? Chronic indecisiveness leads to chronic stress so if all possible we need to blank out the need for decisions to be made in the first place, the only decision that we need to make is that we want to get better.

There is one major advantage of all of this indecision, and that is when it boils down to making a decision to act out on suicidal thoughts. Millions of lives have been spared from this waste where an inability to make the decision to act on them has delayed the decision until help has arrived. It is amazing thing about depression, even when pitted against such a foe, some of what it brings, all negative things by the way, can bring about and net for us a positive result.

There are positives in everything, even in the worst of the worst and the lowest indecision flooded low.

Unfortunately when we are adults, and being that existing in life itself is not a straight forward walk in the park, it may not be possible just to throw everything down, to down tools and get on with the business of dealing with our depression. Life must go on, money must be earned, and those people who are dependent on us must be looked after. This taking care of ourselves, and others will lead to the need for decisions to be made which will only exacerbate the problem with all of the anxiety that goes with these decisions.

Perhaps one of the big delays to our treatment for depression is the actual delay in making the decision to seek it out, via this indecision. All wasted time, caught up in thoughts plagued with malaise, wasted time that could be so used in any manner of better ways. Getting back into life, is not as simple as continuing to function in the same domain you have been.

People used to say to me when they could see I was at a low, ‘to just stick with it.’ To stick with what exactly, were they telling me to stick with doing the things that I had always done, and to do them in the same environment?

The things that I was forced to do by virtue of my being young and having no choice. In going on to do these things in an environment where, again there was no choice. It was all part of the kettle of fish, which left me in the tank full of sharks of depression in the first place. Unfortunately when we are young in spite of our indecision, it makes very little difference when we actually make a decision in the first place, as we don’t have the freedom to do anything about our environment.

I still push people I encounter in need, to get out of the environment they are in, to make a change. Unfortunately making a major change in our lives requires a host of major decisions to be made. Maybe we should hand over power of attorney on our lives to someone else, someone who has our best interests at heart, when our mind does not have our best interests at heart.